The present invention relates to a housing for integrated circuits.
Prior art housings for integrated circuits, hereinafter referred to as IC-housings, are known in particular from page 1 of the reference "Multilayer Ceramic Design Manual", Tri Quint, Semiconductor, Inc. 1989, Revision 1.0, p. 1-11, Appendix A, Appendix B. Also, in the book of Reinmut K. Hoffmann "Integrierte Mikrowellenschaltungen" (Integrated microwave circuits), Publisher Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo, 1983, coupled microstrip lines are described on page 95. The important details regarding IC-housings will again be explained later in connection with FIG. 1a and FIG. 1b.
An IC-housing is supposed to fulfill the following specific requirements, namely a decoupling of signal lines, a high reflection loss even for IC-inputs mismatched in high-impedance fashion and finally a good smoothing of load peaks of dc voltage supplies.
In conventional IC-housings, generally microstrip lines with or without dielectric covering are used as conductor types (see FIG. 1). In the case of these conductor types, the mutual decoupling of adjacent lines is not sufficient for many applications, for example, for large differences in the swing of signals (such as mixed application of ECL-levels, TTL-levels and, CMOS-levels) and for steep switching slopes.
In order to improve decoupling, only each second or third line is used as a signal line, for example, and the lines in between are connected to ground. This method is only moderately effective. In order to increase reflection loss, external compensation measures must be performed on the printed circuit board. In some cases, the problem of smoothing load peaks can be solved by blocking-capacitors which are accommodated on the IC-housing or externally on the printed circuit board. It may also be necessary, however, to modify the IC-layout in order to place disturbing loads at different locations.